Warlord's Revenge Read online

  Stone was for doing something now—and getting the hell out of there with her. Maybe it wouldn’t be that hard. Maybe. He aimed the 44 at the very side of the glass where the two edges met, as far away from April as he could. Turning his own head and shielding it with his other hand, Stone fired. Without looking to see what damage he had wrought, he raised the gun up a foot, fired again, then up another foot or so for a final blast. He turned and saw that it had worked—at least partially. The thick glass had shattered for yards in each direction but still hung together by invisible shatterproof threads within. Stone reached forward and punched at it, making a hole so that he could reach inside and pull whole sections of the broken window out.

  Within thirty seconds Stone had cleared out a space big enough to crawl through and scrambled inside. He jumped up and rushed to April, who seemed to have fallen sound asleep again, even through the gun blasts. Stone pulled his Randall bowie knife from its sheath at his side and reached out to cut the leather thongs that held her upright, tied to two posts. Before he had even reached the first, there was a sudden hiss, and a yellow mist began pouring down from vents in the ceiling.

  “Shit,” Stone screamed as he ripped up the Ruger and fired three quick shots into the ceiling. But he knew even as he did so that it was a futile gesture. He couldn’t shoot gas out of the fucking air—or even hit those who controlled it. It was only the pipes that released the quick-stun muscle gas so that it filled the glass box within seconds. Stone felt his mind sinking again down into a field of pain, as if he was being buried under the dirt by a plowed blanket of asphyxiating mud. The dirty air seemed to fill his lungs and his mouth. And then he was just a chunk of dirt himself, shouting but not being heard from beneath the falling earth of his mind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Stone wondered if he was heading toward heaven or hell as he seemed to shoot down a long white tube of light that was all around him as if he was a moth caught inside a flourescent tube. He’d been basically a good fellow—relatively speaking, that was. Of course, he’d killed a number of men, but that had been since he left the bunker, and only when they tried to do him in first. Yes, all things considered, he certainly was a candidate for cloudland. On the other hand, he had no illusions about the entrance requirements. And though there was some good mixed in there in a few spots, realistically he was heading downstairs, a concept that, even though he was dead, didn’t make him feel too good. Made his stomach crawl, in fact. Which made him wonder even as he shot faster through the tunnel of pure whiteness how dead men and souls could have stomachs.

  Then he was rocketing toward the end, which grew brighter and brighter, and suddenly he was in a sea of colors and voices that blinded and deafened him instantly.

  “He’s coming around, he’s coming around,” a godlike creature seemed to bellow, and Stone’s brainpan shook around like the bells at Notre Dame. “The asshole is coming to.”

  “Ah, how pleasant,” a second voice thundering in over the first. “And I was just thinking I was going to have to leave without having any entertainment today. Mr. Stone, welcome to hell.”

  Stone slowly opened his eyes a painful fraction of an inch at a time. So it was hell—he’d been demoted. Ah, well. He tried to focus on the denizens of the subterranean world with a morbid curiosity as to just what the devil and his minions actually looked like. But the face that sprang into view as he squinted in the light of numerous fluorescent lights overhead was worse than what he had expected: Scalzanni cracking his knuckles and looking most pleased. The pointed rat face grinned down at Stone, who realized as his consciousness slowly began seeping back into his battered brain that not only was he not in hell, but that he was still alive and tied down flat on his back, hardly able to move an inch.

  “My sister—” Stone began, suddenly remembering that she had been with him in his last seconds.

  “Cool out, Stone,” the Mafia crime boss said with a razor-sharp grin. He walked around the hospital bed, stripped of everything so that just a wide board was anchored to the frame, atop which Martin Stone lay naked, his hands and feet tied with unbreakable cords. “She’s okay. Not that it’s any of your fucking concern. She’ll be marketed as one of my stable of virgins. She is, I hope.” He sneered at Stone. “Or were you renting her out yourself, and that’s why you came to get her back?” Scalzanni laughed a wet, little slurping sound, and his black silk suit danced around him as if it were far too big for the emaciated body that was hidden beneath it.

  “Pig,” Stone spat back, “you’d sell your own fucking mother for a nickel.”

  “Oh, it would take far more than a nickel to buy my mother.” Scalzanni smirked. “Though to tell you the truth, there hasn’t been a hell of a lot of demand for her lately—since she died.” The Mafia crime lord laughed loud, and his two personal bodyguards, both looking like relatives of Big-foot, laughed along with him, resulting in lots of snorting and general merriment. Stone took the few seconds to raise his head and see just where he was. He could only move his neck an inch or two by straining hard, and even then he had to lower his eyeballs until they were ready to slide out of their sockets to see anything. But from what he could vaguely discern, he was in a cinder-block room about forty feet long, fifteen or so wide. There were other men tied to beds and boards, all with contraptions covering some part of their body. Stone could hear low groans, an occasional loud one above the harsh laughs of the Mafia crew. The light from rows of fluorescent tubes above was blindingly intense. Whatever sick scenes were going on in this room of death, the management apparently wanted to be able to witness them in vivid, blazing Technicolor.

  “Oh, I am a funny man,” Scalzanni said at last, drying his eyes with a monogrammed purple handkerchief that he extracted from the pocket of his silk jacket. “Now tell me, Mr. Stone,” Scalzanni said as he walked back into view above Stone’s head. “What kind of pain would you like to feel today? We have so many ‘styles’ to choose from down here that sometimes I get lost myself.”

  “My sister,” Stone began again, his brain chugging like a computer as he tried to think of anything he could use to bargain with the slime. “She’s done nothing to you. Why don’t you—”

  “Ah, but I am letting her go,” Scalzanni said, weaving his fingers together and snapping his knuckles, a habit Stone was rapidly growing to hate. “You’re the one I want. Her—I’d rather make the bucks off selling her ass. She’s going to get a good dollar, you goddamn better believe that. I’ve already had offers over $10,000 from some of the boys out West. She may bring in a record amount for a bitch.”

  Stone glared at the concave-faced weasel and was so filled with the desire to kill him that he couldn’t even utter a word, just grow red in the cheeks and bite his teeth so they sounded like rocks grinding against one another.

  “You shouldn’t have killed my brother,” Scalzanni said, the obscene smile suddenly vanishing from his face, taking on its normal undertaker look of imminent death. “Not that I liked the bastard,” Scalzanni went on. “He tried to take me out once. Can you believe it—me, his own brother? Of course, I had tried to have him assassinated myself.” He laughed but only for a second, then the face, which was nothing but yellow skin stretched as tight as a drum head over the protruding cheekbones beneath, grew as cold as the breath of winter itself.

  “But we can try to kill each other—we’re family. You can’t. See, I gotta kill you, Stone, for honor’s sake, for the respect of all the other crime clans. Otherwise they’d say Joey “Cheap” Scalzanni let this scumbag take out his own brother and didn’t even do a thing about it. Not that I mind killing you, of course. In fact, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it tremendously.”

  “I’m so glad to bring joy to a walking pile of vomit like you, Scalzanni. Now I know where my whole life has been leading all these years. My purpose on this earth.”

  “Goddamn right.” the Mafia chief chortled back in that whispering kind of squeal that Stone found most disquieting. “Now, as I was saying,” he
went on as he walked out of his prisoner’s view and over to some crates along one wall, “we get so much stuff going through here”—the warlord chuckled from across the room—”for selling, putting on display. But all the torture equipment—they pull it out for me so’s I can see it first. Ain’t they a great bunch of guys I got working for me?” Stone could hear him throwing metal things around, so they clanked against one another. “Ah, here it is—I been waiting for a set of these for months now.”

  He walked back into view, dangling two strange-looking little metal boxes with all kinds of levers and gears on them. “You know, there’s so many ways to create pain in a man… or woman—there I go being sexist again.” Scalzanni laughed. “All my whores tell me to watch out for that. But the feet—the feet, Stone,” Scalzanni said excitedly, as if he were teaching Stone some great lesson that he would gratefully carry forward into life. “The feet are capable of the greatest fucking pain that a man can know.”

  “Is that so?” Stone asked with a bored expression as he tried to wriggle his toes. His feet had been doubly bound at each corner of the bed so that his exposed soles extended over the board. He couldn’t move them an inch. Suddenly he felt hands on them, and then cold metal against the tops and bottoms of each foot. Then something much worse. Needles or nails—hundreds of them—pressing against every square inch of each of the soles. They were sharp, pointed like sewing needles, and even just resting against his skin, but not breaking, it caused waves of pain to shoot up and down his legs.

  “You see, the feet have the most nerve endings in the entire body,” Scalzanni went on from the foot of the bed. “Did you know that, Stone? Isn’t that something? The goddamn soles of the feet have the most fucking nerve endings per cubic whatever-the-fuck-it-is of any part of the human anatomy. To demonstrate, let me just tighten this lever here.” The Mafia chief began turning some little wheel on the side of one of the metal boxes, and the needles began moving forward a thousandth of an inch at a time. Stone felt some of them pop through the skin and winced hard as his whole body tried to arch up on the board. It did hurt—like a motherfucker.

  “There, isn’t that an interesting sensation?” Scalzanni asked, coming into view again so the pointed face was staring down at him. “And you know what? The deeper I push them needles, the more it hurts. Ain’t that something?” He smiled at Stone, the iron smile of the cold killer. “So you and me gonna have a lot of fun. Keep it going for days. But first I got a meeting I can’t miss. Biggest sale ever of firepower to the West Coast Guardians of Hell. Make me the biggest son of a bitch in this whole area.” He disappeared again, and Stone felt the needles on the second torture shoe being pushed in a little farther. Both legs now were filled with the paralyzing rushes of pure pain. “Otherwise I wouldn’t dream of straying from this little party,” Scalzanni said. “But don’t worry—I’ll be back. Real soon. So you just think about how this feels and know that it’s going to get a lot worse. A whole lot worse.” The Mafia don giggled again, and then Stone heard feet stomping and a door open and close.

  He tried to move his mind away from the pain. Tried every mind trick he could remember his father telling him about to avoid the sensation of pain. Drop your center, breathe deep, go into your mind… . All good advice, but like all good advice, a million times easier said than carried out. Especially when his feet felt like pincushions. He heard footsteps walking fully around the room as if checking on all its victims, and then a door opening again and closing.

  They were alone. The assholes had left them unguarded. Somehow Stone fought against the searing pain from his feet and again raised his head up. He was bound down so securely that it placed a terrific strain on his neck and shoulder muscles to raise up, but he did, welcoming the new pain as a relief from the blistering soles of his feet.

  There were five others in the cinder-block room. Each of them in some torture device of his own. The man immediately to Stone’s left—his whole head was inside of a metal mask, nothing else on his body touched. Beyond him, Stone could see just a head poking free from the top of a coffinlike box that contained him from thighs to neck. His eyes were open, but he stared straight ahead as if unseeing. Far down the room, Stone could see what looked like a steel vat perhaps eight feet wide and six feet high. A man hung suspended above it from ropes on a pulley that were fitted around his shoulders. He had been lowered into the vat to the waist, but other than that he didn’t look as if they had tried to slice him or anything. His eyes, too, were open, staring off somewhere into a private hell that was uncommunicable.

  “Anyone alive out there?” Stone said, though the use of his mouth just made the pain burn out down at his feet. “Any of you poor bastards alive?”

  “I—I am, I think,” the man to the left of Stone whispered back, though it was hard to hear him clearly through the iron mask.

  “What… what have they done to you?” Stone asked as he tried to keep his mind on his words and the other poor son of a bitch, and away from the puncturing needles that were ripping into his own nerve endings.

  “My face—they’ve put spikes through it. Slowly they keep moving deeper into me. I—I—”

  “And I—” another voice hissed out from the coffinlike structure past the masked man. “They’ve put me in this damn iron maiden.” Stone could just see the head poking from the top of the thing like a mummy who hadn’t been completely sealed in. “God, it hurts. I think the spikes have pierced my organs now. There are hundreds of them—hundreds—”

  “Me—” another voice croaked out through the blood scented-air. “They’ve stripped all my skin off of me—sliced it with scalpels. I have no flesh from my neck down. Oh, God—I can feel my muscles and veins twitching in the cold air. Kill me—someone kill me. I beg you.”

  “And him,” Stone asked as he caught the eye of the head that stared at him from the top of the spiked coffin. “The one in the swimming pool—what’s his brand of torture?”

  “Him,” the head said with a grim smile that Stone thought quite admirable considering the fact that the wretched bastard was being pierced clear through by a hundred barbecue skewers, “he’s floating in acid, man. Pure sulfuric acid. There ain’t a drop of him left below the water line.”

  Stone craned his neck as far as it would go and got another glimpse of the body suspended above the vat. To his horror, the eyes on the thing opened and gazed back at him with a pain beyond the pale. And suddenly, just having his own feet turned into porcupine parking lots didn’t seem so bad—compared to a man whose legs, hips—and balls—had all been melted away. A man who was only half there.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Stone had been wrong when he woke up and thought he was still alive. He was in hell. Nothing could be more horrible than this. They broke off conversation—if the grunts and moans that were emitted from each torture implement were language—when the door suddenly flew open again and one of the guards made his rounds of the torturees to make sure they weren’t trying anything funny. Though how any of them would quite go about such a thing in the condition they were in was not something he wondered about.

  “Yo—acid man,” the guard said as he came up to the vat of acid with the man dangling in it. “You still kicking or what?” He put his face real close to the tied-up victim to look into his unblinking eyes, though he found it hard to imagine that the sucker could still be alive. He had been lowered into the vat nearly forty-eight hours ago—inch by agonizing inch. First his toes and feet had been dissolved, then his calves. All the way to where it had reached now—about three inches above the hips, where it had dissolved his genitalia and lower organ tracts.

  “I said ‘yo, acid man,’ are you still—” But he stopped in mid-sentence as the dangling half corpse suddenly opened its pale lips and spat at him, catching the gray jumpsuit-clad torture attendant right in the eye. The guard jumped back, as if he’d been stung with poison, and wiped at his eye furiously, apparently enraged and maddened by the transfer of human body mucus from that�
��“thing”—to him. The other prisoners—those who could see or make sounds, which was a grand total of three—all made attempts at cheering noises at the way the half-man had stood up to the guard.

  “Scum, scum,” the guard bellowed, retreating backward from the room to wash the death slime off his face. “You’ll feel my anger when I return.” He stormed out of the place, slamming the door so hard that the needles on Stone’s feet shook and seemed to drive another fraction of an inch deeper. Just what the hell the asshole guard intended to “punish” them with was beyond Stone’s, or any of the other torture victims’, imaginations. Things were, to say the least, already in a fairly painful state for all of them.

  Suddenly the Mafia guard was back, throwing the door open and standing at the entrance in a dramatic pose with some kind of barbed-wire whip in his hands, and he snapped it through the air so it made a whistling sound.

  “Now, who was laughing?” the guard said, walking forward with loud, stomping steps so his boots echoed ominously within the cinder-block walls. “I said who was—” Suddenly Stone heard a rushing sound and a loud groan. He craned hs neck to see what the hell was happening and got a whiff of strong perfume. Peaches! The name shot through his mind just as his eyes caught the range of a bizarre sight. The whore had her hand around the guard’s mouth and was pulling his whole head backward. At the same time she was driving her “ice pick” clean through the torture tech’s neck. As she sort of steered the package of jerking meat forward, she continued to twist the steel blade back and forth, making sure every nerve was cut. When she was satisfied, the ancient hooker ripped the ganglia-cutter out and kicked the body forward hard, her big leg, varicose veins and all, swinging up from beneath her pink tafetta gown. The dead meat flew forward across the room, not stopping until its head smashed into the far wall, where it exploded in pieces and dribbled down the wall onto the quivering corpse that lay on the floor.